


Chance and Chemistry

by sanguinity



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, First Meetings, Story: The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2019-03-20 23:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13728474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: Joan glances at the stage and comes to a dead stop: not only does the singer have a voice like Sinatra, but he has a face like Brando.Guys and Dolls x Charles Augustus Milverton.





	Chance and Chemistry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beanarie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/gifts).



> A bit longer than I intended, but it ran away with me. For the record, it is *very* weird to write CHAS for a pairing other than Holmes/Watson -- CHAS is a very slashy story! -- so if this comes off as a bit more OT3 than pure Joanbell... well. It's only to be expected, I suppose.
> 
> Originally posted in my "Harbor" collection ([and there's still a copy there](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1558469/chapters/3853375)), but this _really_ should have been posted as a stand-alone.

Sherlock is insistent that he needs up on the school roof, and so Joan agrees to help him break into the auditorium tech booth: it has a trapdoor up to the stage rigging, which itself has access directly to the roof. Standing lookout while Sherlock picks the booth’s lock, Joan notes with absent approval that whoever is on stage is doing a credible job with “Luck be a Lady.” She doesn’t usually have opinions about old Hollywood musicals—she only has an opinion on _Guys and Dolls_ because she is amused by its conjunction of Sinatra, _The Godfather,_ and the corniest version of the mafia ever filmed—but she will never forgive the film for casting a nasal croaker as the dreamboat Sky Masterson while letting the dreamboat _voice_ in its cast languish on comic patter songs.

Whoever is onstage is a far better choice for Sky than Marlon Brando was, she can tell that even from outside the auditorium. When Joan and Sherlock finally gain access to the booth, she glances at the stage through the window and comes to a dead stop: not only does the singer have a voice like Sinatra, but he has a face like Brando.

Well, okay, he looks nothing like Brando—besides being short and black, the actor has a babyface that Brando never had—but he is still one of the prettiest boys Joan has ever seen. He moves like Sky Masterson ought to, too: effortless sex-on-legs confidence, but tinged with the uncertainty of a man who, for the first time in his life, is about to get an ear full of cider.

She doesn’t realize she has stopped to watch until Sherlock comes back for her. He looks from the stage to Joan and makes an expectant noise. When that does not rouse her, he tugs Joan’s sleeve. “Watson, the _roof_ ,” he pleads.

The number finishes in a hash of bungled choreography. The director bellows his dismay at the dancers, and Joan follows Sherlock up through the ceiling hatch.

Joan quickly forgets about the singer. In addition to her SAT prep, she is taking a full load of AP math and science courses—she’s determined to get into Columbia pre-med—and chasing Sherlock across rooftops is the only thing that makes her courseload bearable. Between school and Sherlock, there really isn’t any time leftover for boys. (Or rather, there isn’t time for the rites and rituals of boy- _catching_ : Emily has offered to coach her, but Joan can’t bring herself to invest the time.) Even so, when the posters go up around school advertising the opening of _Guys and Dolls_ , she stops to look.

“Marcus Bell,” Sherlock intones from behind her shoulder.

“I can read as well as you,” she tells him.

“He’s newly transferred from Sinatra Arts,” Sherlock adds, because _of course_ Sherlock saw that she was interested and decided to do a complete background check. “He has a brother in our year. Andre, one of the shop kids, I wouldn’t think you know him.” She doesn’t. Sherlock seems to know someone in every social group, including those who seldom show up for school, but that’s hardly surprising given his own sketchy attendance. “And in addition to being a competent baritone, which you already know, he’s also a JV wrestler.”

Joan makes a soft noise of approval. She should have recognized his physique: the wrestlers are all very lovely to look at, just as long as one keeps one’s gaze below the neck. Not that there is any reason in the world to ignore Marcus Bell’s face. “Junior?” she asks. Seniors are usually given a varsity spot out of courtesy, if nothing else.

“Sophomore.”

So not just a baby _face_ , but an actual baby. “Why’s he here?” Joan asks, because kids who get into the specialty schools tend to stay there.

“Some drama with his brother. You should ask him out.”

“Excuse you?” Joan turns to look at him.

He shrugs. “Maybe it’ll get Emily off your back for ‘letting me see other girls.’”

Joan rolls her eyes. It would get Emily off of _his_ back, too, which is probably more important to him. “C’mon,” she tells him, “we’ve got class.”

Joan buys a ticket for opening night. Much of the show is a hot mess, but Marcus Bell is as strong a Sky Masterson as she hoped. Happily, whoever was in charge of costuming found a suit for him that actually fits: pressed and tailored, he’s even prettier than he was in rehearsal.

The next afternoon, while Joan works through a set of distance-velocity-acceleration problems at the kitchen table, her mother asks, “What’s that you’re humming?”

Joan plays back the last few notes to herself. She blushes furiously to discover it’s “I’ll Know.”

“Nothing, Ma,” she lies. “Just something that’s been playing around school.”

“Mm,” Mrs. Watson says, giving her daughter a considering look.

She sees the show again that night. She’s not fangirling, she swears: it’s just that Brando as Masterson bugs her _that badly_ , and she’ll enjoy the fix-it while she has it. The show only plays for another weekend, after all.

At intermission, she finds a text from Sherlock, wanting to know where she is. By the time the house lights come up after the final curtain, she has received two more. She steps out onto the front steps of the school to find Sherlock lounging against a wall, waiting for her.

“You really should ask him out,” he says. “I haven’t seen you crush on anyone this hard since Rosa.”

Her back goes stiff. She’s in no mood to talk about Rosa. “What did you want?”

Sherlock glances around at the thinning crowd. “This way,” he says, and he leads her back around a corner to a spot of relative privacy. “I have strong evidence that the school nurse is part of a blackmailing ring.”

For two weeks, the blackmailing ring takes up all of Joan and Sherlock’s time. (Although Joan still manages to discover the location of Marcus’s locker: upstairs back hallway, near the chemistry classroom.)

“Shouldn’t we just take what we have to the police?” she asks Sherlock. She has met some of its victims, and is just as eager to see this set right as he is.

“The police can’t do anything unless the victims are willing to make their secrets public. And if they were willing to do _that—”_

“—then a blackmailer couldn’t take advantage of them in the first place.”

“Quite so,” he says. “I hate to say it, but there’s nothing to do but to break into the office and steal back the evidence myself.”

“Ourselves,” Joan corrects him.

Sherlock’s eyes snap to her. _“Myself,”_ he says. “You can’t afford to get caught. You’re trying to get into Columbia; you need a perfect record for that.”

“It’d be safer if there were two of us. You’ve said they were dangerous.”

“They are. Which is why I can’t—”

“If you don’t let me come, I’ll go straight to Principal Harvey.”

Sherlock stares at her. “You’d _tattle.”_ Something that is nearly a smile creeps over his face. “Well, then. I’ll get a second ticket to the Winter Formal. We’re going to use the dance as our cover for being in the school tomorrow night.”

Joan hits the thrift shops the next morning—she’s not going to spend her stepfather’s money on a dress for a fake dance—and finds a long gown in midnight blue, suitable for disappearing into the night if she and Sherlock have to run for it. She spends the rest of the afternoon sewing a pair of deep pockets into the skirt’s side seams: why dressmakers assume a girl wants to be _useless_ when she’s wearing a dress, she doesn’t know.

When she meets Sherlock in front of the school, he’s wearing running shoes with his tux. With a grin, she twitches aside the skirt of her dress to show off her own pair of running shoes. She colored them in with a black sharpie so that they wouldn’t be too noticeable under the skirt of her gown; there are still ink smears on her hands.

He laughs. “I see you’re a natural at this sort of thing.” He’s thrumming with energy, obviously looking forward to the evening. She has to admit that she is, too.

They lurk for a while at the dance itself, killing time until the coast is clear. When they finally make their attempt at the nurse’s office, she stands watch while he picks the lock. Once inside, she takes a station near the door, keeping a watch on the hall through the small, wire-impregnated window, while Sherlock absorbs himself with breaking into the filing cabinets. “HIPAA-protected files, Watson! Nobody but the school nurse can get into these without a court order. You’ve seen how fiercely she defends them, and no one thinks to question it. It’s just a matter of finding which drawer…”

But Joan isn’t listening to his monolog, because one of the men involved in the ring—Mr. Charles, the school counselor—has come into the hall, with a key in his hand and his eyes fixed on the door to the nurse’s office. Joan draws back from the window, trusting that the darkness in the office will hide her face, and hisses at Sherlock to kill his flashlight. He does. Mr. Charles keeps coming.

“Hide!” she hisses at Sherlock. He quietly slides the drawer shut, then dashes for the supply closet. There’s just room for both of them. There would be more space in the examination room at the back, but that’s a dead end, and they would have no hope of slipping past Mr. Charles to get to the outer door. They stand there in the dark and wait.

Over the hammering of her heart, Joan can hear _two_ voices. She has no idea who the second voice is, but it’s insistent. She finally sidles out of the closet to see what is happening in the hall; Sherlock grabs at her hand to try to stop her. She shakes him off, and he hisses unhappily. Keeping well back from the light coming through the door’s window, she edges across the room until she can see what is happening.

It’s Marcus Bell in the hall. He’s urgently telling Mr. Charles something, gesticulating down the corridor—not toward the dance, but toward the exit doors at the other end. Mr. Charles seems undecided about whatever Marcus is telling him, but he finally makes up his mind and leads the way to the exterior door. Marcus lets Mr. Charles get a step ahead of him, and then casts a furtive glance back at the medical office, where Joan is standing. She draws back with a start. He holds up two fingers, and nods meaningfully. He knows she’s there, even if he can’t see her.

“Sherlock, _move!”_ she hisses. “Get what you came for! We have two minutes, but I wouldn’t count on longer.”

Sherlock bursts out of the closet and lunges for the cabinets, rifling the files again. He left the cabinets unlocked when they hid, which is fortunate now, but might have been disastrous if Mr. Charles had actually come inside. She keeps an eye on the hallway, twitching with nervousness while she silently counts the time.

“Done,” Sherlock says at long last, sliding the zipper on his pack. She hears him depressing the locking buttons on the wall of filing cabinets, one after another, and then they skitter out into the hallway together. He wants to head for the exit at the end of the hall, but she grabs his hand to turn him back toward the dance, away from where Marcus and Mr. Charles went.

Once inside the dance, Sherlock tries to continue through to the main entrance, but Joan ducks toward a side door. “Watson!” he calls over the music, as he darts to catch up with her. “Where are you going? There’s a shredder at home. The sooner we destroy these, the safer everyone will be.”

Joan waves him off. “You go on. Marcus drew Mr. Charles off, I need to make sure he’s okay.”

Sherlock considers for only a moment. “They went out to the east lot?” At her nod, Sherlock hurries for the side door with her.

Marcus slips inside the door just before they reach it. Joan and Sherlock tumble to a stop in front of him, and Marcus’s face lights up as he recognizes them. “Oh, hey!” he says.

“Hey,” Joan says back, unable to push down the giddiness in her smile. She can _hear_ Sherlock roll his eyes.

“You guys made it back okay! Good. That’s good,” Marcus says.

Sherlock makes a rude noise, and Joan turns to glare at him. “Yes, yes,” Sherlock says, “as we can all see, everyone’s fine.” He pokes his head through the door for a moment. “And Mr. Charles is…?”

“Pretty irritated that we ran a big loop of that end of the school without finding any sign of a fight. I held him as long as I could, but last I saw he was headed back to the nurse’s office again. What were you guys doing in there?”

“He’s going to be worse than irritated in a moment,” Joan warns, cutting a look at Sherlock.

Sherlock nods tightly. “And you had best not be here when he gets back” he agrees, looking at Marcus, “Safest if you come with us. I’m sorry, Watson, I know Bell here was hoping for a dance with you, but there will be other dances. Prom, perhaps.”

“Wait, _what?”_ Joan shouts after his retreating back. She turns to Marcus, who shifts uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, he sometimes—”

“No, no, it’s fine, it was clear pretty quick that you weren’t here to dance.”

Joan stares at him a moment.

Sherlock indignantly stalks back across the dance floor to them. “Mr. Charles is about to come back in that door, and it would be a very good thing if he didn’t see us all together.” He turns to Marcus. “He’s part of a blackmailing ring. We were stealing back the evidence he and his associates have been using to terrorize people.”

Marcus holds his ground. “What you’re gonna do with it?”

“Shred it, of course,” Sherlock growls, “if we ever manage to get to a shredder.” He turns for the main entrance again.

Marcus looks to Joan for confirmation. “We can’t take it to the police,” Joan elaborates, following Sherlock. Marcus falls in beside her. “Not without hurting the victims further. This way, we can at least put the blackmailers out of business for a while.”

“Well, that’s a comfort to know. If I’m going to get a juvie record for abetting trespassing and burglary, I want it to be for a good cause.”

“Burgling for justice,” Joan smirks. “That’s us.”

Sherlock groans as he pushes through the school’s front doors.

Joan skips out ahead of him, running down the front steps to the rainwashed pavement. The light from the streetlamps gleams gold, just like in the song.

Marcus’s footsteps chase down the stairs behind her, the hard soles of his shoes rasping on the concrete. “ _Comes up clean and fresh and cold…”_ he sings quietly, just audible over the muffled thrum of the dance, and she whirls to look at him. “Sorry,” he says, coming to a stop beside her with an embarrassed smile, “we just closed a show last week.”

“Oh, she knows,” Sherlock says as he passes them. “She saw it three times.”

Joan doesn’t embarrass easily—she and Sherlock could never have become friends if she did—but her cheeks heat anyway.

“Yeah?” Marcus asks her. His eyes are hopeful.

She shrugs, trying for casual. “You're a better Obediah than Brando was.”

His smile is delighted, but when she smiles back at him, he can only hold her eyes a few moments before he looks down in sudden shyness. It’s charming, but also contagious, and soon she’s looking away, too. After another few moments of uncoordinated dithering, they run the few steps to catch up with Sherlock again.

“So,” Marcus says, falling into step beside Sherlock, “blackmailing ring? You're serious?"

Sherlock nods. "Can't show you the evidence without further compromising the victims' privacy, but yes."

Marcus considers that a moment. "So stealing back the evidence is good, but how do you keep them from starting up again? Or from coming after us, for that matter? Does Mr. Charles have reason to think either of you are mixed up in this?”

Sherlock turns a startled glance on Marcus, then looks him over, head to toe. He looks across to Joan. She shrugs back at him: all-hands-in quick thinking is part of the thrill of running across rooftops with Sherlock, and given Marcus's leap of faith in the hallway earlier, he looks as if he’ll keep up fine.

Sherlock raises an eyebrow at her and turns back to Marcus. “Excellent question,” he says, with the false grouchiness he sometimes uses when he’s pleased. “We have all day tomorrow to figure it out.”


End file.
